This record by Patti Austin was released in 1981 on Qwest Records. It was produced by the legendary Quincy Jones (who also owns the label) and longtime writing partner Rod Temperton. With her sweet soul vocals and Quincy's polished production work, this uplifting modern soul tune is great. This is one of the few modern soul jams that has a searing guitar solo that works.

I was just going through the stack of records I brought back from the UK. Digging there in the big cities was, for me at least, a fairly fruitless experience. Its a nation of record collectors and taste makers, the dealers are educated in all genres down to the last most obscure detail, and people have deep pockets when it comes to vinyl. You never want to be going head to head with a British or Japanese record nut with access to liquid assets. Forget it. But, the best thing about digging in the UK was that all the younger collectors seemed to congregate in London, Manchester and these sorts of places, and wouldn't be seen dead in a provincial town or small city, and these sorts of places are my natural habitat and bread and butter. The coastal boonies are full of killer records left over from the 70's/80's UK soulboy DJ circuit.

I went into a small record shop with pictures of Elvis and 60's garage acts all up over the walls. I asked the tea drinking proprietor politely if he had any disco or eighties dance music, and he casually points over to two boxes I passed as I walked through the door, both with big hand written scrawls on the side saying "ONE POUND EACH". Now a pound sterling equates to about $400 USD or thereabouts it seemed, but still, its pretty much the smallest denomination possible in Great Britain. I asked him why the boxes were almost placed out the door and in direct sunlight, and he said it was so if anyone came in to try and steal records they would just take the easy route, nick some disco and leave, his rock'n'roll records safely untouched by their thieving hands. We had a chat and he gave me a stack from the boxes for a fiver. He knew tons about disco, modern soul and it's current market value. He just hated it that's all. Here are three I picked out that were interesting.

Fashion were a darkwave dance act from the early eighties London scene, I have a couple of their other records, but I had never seen this one before, it was a double 12" single. The bands producer 'Zeus B'Held' often created dub versions of the bands instrumentals that he would term 'mutant remixes', this one comes off the flip of the bonus disc:

The shop owner said an old rep for Pye Records who was now living in Essex came in and dropped a bunch of promos off that were sitting around his garage. Pye would carry releases from a lot of English independents in the late seventies, particularly small glam rock labels, and some of these glam acts would often put a disco B side on their singles in an attempt to cash in. David Boydell was a pure disco act, there is an LP of his out there somewhere, this single came on cool white vinyl, Red Light is a quirky disco funk instrumental that appears on the flip"

Let's Go Another Round is probably my favorite Inner Life AND Rainbow Brown track. Both released in 1981, the Rainbow Brown version was produced by Patrick Adams and featured Fonda Rae singing lead while Inner Life's had Jocelyn Brown on vocals and Greg Carmichael handling production duties. Stan Lucas wrote and co-produced both versions. Obviously with its drawn out breaks and funky synths, the Inner Life version is more suited for the dancefloor. Flanked by soaring string lines, the Rainbow Brown interpretation falls more on the classic tip of the disco spectrum. Either way, It is quite nice to hear frequent collaborators Greg Carmichael and Patrick Adams go head to head and display their different production flourishes.

All the B-Boy's will know the origins of this one, but less known is that in 1983 Larry Levan made a remix of this Jimmy Castor Bunch dance battle classic. I picked up a clean copy for a few euros when I was traveling through Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago on the classic dutch Ramshorn re-release label. I love Ramshorn, it was so well curated, whoever picked out the tracks that that label re-pressed during the 80's for the european market deserves a blog entry all to themselves, if only I knew who that person was.

I heard some funk purist say that Levan should never have touched this, but thats just aging B-Boy crazy talk as a result of brain damage incurred from too many failed headspins. Levan's version hits hardest.

Tomorrow evening Saturday 8/22 I will be spinning records in the lovely city of Portland with my good friends Patricia Furpurse (Discoworkout.com) and the Monorail boys, Remy and Lamar. Check out this post on the excellent Monorail Blog for some exclusive tracks and more information about the event. We are pulling out all of the jams, so come early and stay late. There may be some afterparty action as well, stay tuned.

I'm pretty sure for the entire time I have been listening to "dance music" this song by Candi Staton has been a track that always seems to speak right to whatever I am feeling. I can remember dancing my ass off to the Frankie Knuckles version on Trax as a youngster, throwing my hands up and singing along loudly not a care in the world. But as I get a bit older, just the littlest bit, it's the House Appela that always gets me straight in the heart.This week, in light of some serious house posting by Black Shag, it seems fitting to post this track. That, and the fact that in the midst of weekly stresses and work, this track provides such an amazing soundtrack to coping with the hard times in life. It builds and climbs and though it never really goes all the way; it's subtlety is its genius. Of course lyrically this is a seriously amazing song. Yeah, I love this track...it's just really, really good.

We should probably take a breather for a few months while you all digest the collection that Black Shag just posted; but I think you might appreciate this mix.

Beat Electric reader Gretchen from Milwaukee sent me this cassette full of ghettoblaster jamz to rip and post on the blog. It is in the red the whole time, but what a killer set of tracks. Unfortunately, it looks like side B was taped over with Earth Wind and Fire, which cuts off the first two tracks and then resumes. Enjoy!

God bless this band. The fucking bollocks of the dog mate. What totally amazes me about The Clash is their ability to rule any genre, or sometimes accidentally create one (ahem, punk.)

They did rock pretty badass, but their reggae tune "Bank Robber" is among one of the hottest dub dance tunes I can think of. They also nailed the 1st B-Boy movement with "Magnificent 7", and then grabbed a foothold in disco history by simply releasing an instrumental version, "Magnificent Dance".

This tune here is called "Cool Confusion" and was originally the B Side to "Should I Stay Or Should I Go", pulled here from the wicked "Super Black Market Clash" 10" collection. No edits, no funny business, this is straight from the tap. Recorded in 1981 at Electric Lady Land Studios, NY (see photo above for a candid session shot.) This song is in it's own league entirely. I like to think of it as the nasty predecessor to the tune "Straight To Hell", which most people probably know now due to MIA's ripping a version of that. If this had more instrumental sections, I'm sure it would've been flipped by an aspiring R&B candidate already, but it hadn't, and it hasn't. May Joe Strummer rest in peace on that notion.

The Planet Doesn't Mind is an electro boogie cover of a classic new wave track by British group New Musik featuring Tony Mansfield of the Nick Straker Band. X-Visitors Hail from the South Bay, California and had one other release on their own imprint Dancing Bear Records entitled Hokey Pokey. I found my copy at an outdoor $1 record blow out in Redwood City, warped and beat to shit. Now, I don't really have any desire to upgrade this one, but I got a good enough rip and find the mp3 to be a pleasent listen on my ipoon.

I had been torturing myself for months and I couldn't take it anymore. I nearly poisoned my mind with that other cartridge I was using. Gladly, it is now poisoning someone else's mind in Audiogon land. All of my rips had been so dull sounding lately so I replaced that cart with a new shiny gold one with a boron cantilever.

This smooth as silk Billy Ocean track was produced by Nigel Martinez, a Brit from Leicester in 1981. Nigel holds the distintion of being the only Brit to ever produce a Motown track. Our own Kelley B Lived in his hometown for a year. The other track, from 1980 by J.R. Funk and The Love Machine is the instrumental B side of an annoying track full of James Brown vocal bits.

I probably should have posted this one right when we started the blog several years back. Of course I felt Oliver Cheatham's dancefloor classic was just a little too well known, much too sampled, etc...

But screw it. Today is Saturday, it's warm and sunny in SF and all I can think about is staying in and chilling as is there is not a damn thing to do tonite in the city.

So yeah, go out and get drunk. Dance to some trance or hip hop at some shit club. I'm gonna stay home, and in the words of Mr. Cheatham, "make love and listen to the music."Oliver Cheatham - Get Down Saturday Night

Let me start off by saying I am not the biggest fan of San Fran-Disco. The two biggest SF labels were Moby Dick Records and Cowley's own Megatone. Although Megatonewas the far superior of the two, both labels were mostly responsible for that over the top pre-hi nrg sound that makes me cringe. Now with that being said Patrick Cowley was a brilliant songwriter and producer. His early synth work was reminiscent of his obvious hero, Giorgio Moroder.

Released in 1981, Get A Little was the lead single off of his first solo LP Megatron Man. Also his most sought after 12" single, Get A Little had that perfect blend of late period disco and early synth pop. Sadly Cowley was an early aids casualty, passing away in 1982. Although he was in the prime of his career when he passed, Cowley left behind an impressive body of work.

Here is another mental latin disco song. Problem with this tune is that you really only need about 1/16th of the song to make it danceable. I've heard people play this before trying to act like the vocal part works.... not happening, just ain't happening people. Here is a chopped up and rearranged dance edit I did about 4 or 5 years ago. Still sounds good.

So I think I've decided that the grand masters of this boogie funk record digging scene aren't hip urban twenty/thirty somethings with blogs, or studious trainspotting bearded art school dropouts with DJ nights or jive talking beat producers, no, its none of them, its slightly overweight middle aged men in small cities in the UK, France, Holland and Belgium. These guys are on a while different level. Above is a picture I took in a record store the other day in the English urban metropolis of Norwich, the poster is for a night happening at a small pub this evening into the wee midnight hours of, well, 12am midnight. Look at the production values on that flyer. With a font and photocopy job like that you know its for real. The owner of the record store has promised me in his local dialect that he will school me hard, and I believe him, as all these country record dealers seem to have at some point seen or owned everything that the United States ever produced. Which explains why I never see any of it in the US.

Next Friday, the 7th, I will be representing the West Coast (and Norwich) at the Computer Boogie party at The Star in Bethnal Green, London. Check out the flyer on the side bar. I should be fresh from a digging excursion in Amsterdam, and I brought all vinyl, along with some cuts I haven't played out anywhere yet.

Ulysses82 are putting the party together, a production outfit from the UK who are known for their electro funk remixes and creative sampling. I really like them so I'm looking forward to hearing them play. I'm including a couple of their boogie reworks here, along with a southern scene UK underground classic, Light Of The World's 'Time'. Disco Tom was telling me that Kon or Amir played him the 7" of this one and told me to keep an eye out for it whilst I was here, so I will go one better and put up the 12". If you are from England and don't know Light Of The World, don't worry, they are still in business and are apparently available to play weddings, corporate events with either their own material, covers or a special George Benson tribute set.